Tears of the Sun is one of those what-if-America-had-gone-in-and-saved-some-people
military fantasy movies, kind of like Behind Enemy Lines a year
ago. In Behind Enemy Lines, Owen Wilson ran around war-torn Serbia
and a bunch of Serbian tanks got blown up at the end. In Tears of the
Sun, Bruce Willis runs around war-torn Nigeria and a bunch of Nigerian
rebels get blown up at the end. Americans get to feel good about what they
would have done in some alternate history, and everybody gets to go home.

The problem is, this kind of movie is totally gutless. There's no way,
for example, that Tears of the Sun would ever consider facing the
true question of African genocide: how can people one day wake up and decide
to chop their neighbors to pieces with machetes? That whole thing's a little
too yikes!, a little too complex, scary, difficult --and besides, there
aren't any Americans in that story. So instead, predictably, TotS
gives us an American soldier's eye view of the situation, drained of every
scrap of social or political context, reducing the whole thing to Bruce
Willis hiking about 30 villagers through the jungle.

TotS, while purporting to care about the Nigerians, actually
goes out of its way to portray them as the most anonymous, undifferentiated
group of Negroes you'll ever see, an amorphous brown blob of people who
need American rescuing. There's zero characterization, none of them have
names or personalities --hell, they don't even talk to each other. They
troop along behind Bruce Willis as he tries to get them across the border
to Cameroon, or just sit there, being filmed, like they're in a World Vision
commercial. There are a couple of strong faces in the crowd, but that's
about it.

To be fair, it's not as though the film splurges on characterization
for any of the main characters, either. Quite the opposite. Bruce Willis
is stiff, the doctor he's there to save barely registers, and maybe by
the end of the movie we have a dim sense of who the other soldiers are.
There's just not a lot of human life in this film, nothing or nobody to
care about.

Unlike Behind Enemy Lines, this is not a goofball action movie
at heart. No, this is a slow, emotionally dull trudge. And it's dark. Not
morally dark, but dark in a "Is that Bruce Willis or a troop of Nigerian
rebels?" kind of way. Though there's gunfire and violence, it's uninvolving,
superficial. The film shows the aftermath of an ethnic cleansing, but it
doesn't have the guts to truly, viscerally horrify us, nor can it affect
a detached, documentary tone, so it splits the squishy middle and somehow
makes these horrors forgettable. There are piles of bodies, but there's
no insight. Who are these people? Why are they doing this? And hey, doesn't
Nigeria have a shitload of oil? Tears of the Sun doesn't even pretend to
care.

There are other movies that do everything this movie does, and better.
For an American military perspective on Africa, check out Black Hawk
Down's contextless shitstorm of exhausted American soldiers getting
the crap kicked out of them. For a story about US soldiers helping refugees
to safety, watch Three Kings and learn some real things about America
and Iraq. Tears of the Sun is just masturbatory imaginary self-congratulation
whose message is "If we happen to be around, we're gonna save some people!"
Bleah.